


litany

by erzi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2020-12-27 00:49:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: oneshots corresponding to prompts for#hexorcists2k19over on tumblr





	1. memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Will you remember it?" Seiji asked, careful to carry himself with that nonchalance Shuuichi took him for.
> 
> His hands curled to fists; his eyes set like stone. "Yes."
> 
> Seiji smiled.

Shuuichi's laugh was bright over frog croaks and cricket chirps, bright enough to skitter two birds from their tree perch, their sharp silhouettes darker than the evening sky. "I got it!" he said, holding up a sealing pot. "I really got it!"

Seiji hopped down from the hill he'd been watching over, defense from far away in case he was needed. He hadn't been, but he couldn't say he minded much. He approached Shuuichi, smile near-smothered by the forest's shadows, revealed only by the diminishing sunlight that fell shapelessly between leaves. "And it only took you the whole day," he said.

The quivering corners of Shuuichi's mouth turned down; the eagerness in his eyes abated as he gave Seiji a half-lidded scowl.

Now it was Seiji who laughed. "You're only a beginner, Shuuichi-san; don't give me that look. This is progress."

"You could be nicer about it," he grumbled, nesting the pot in a messy crumple of papers inside his lump of a bag.

Seiji folded his collapsible bow back into his own bag, that same smile his only response.

A youkai had been causing trouble out here, far enough from their homes no one had bothered to exorcise it yet. Hearing about it, Seiji had expected Shuuichi to be the one who attempted the job – and he'd been right, arriving to the edge of the forest to find Shuuichi with twigs and leaves in his hair, as he'd been setting traps throughout since morning. He'd dawdled by Shuuichi, despite his snappy insistence he didn't need help, because that was all Shuuichi could do: hurl words at him. There were no consequences to disobeying him except his glowers, and Seiji did not mind those, either.

"You know what to do next with it, right?" Seiji said, already certain of Shuuichi's answer, but going through with the question to actually hear it.

Shuuichi paused. "There's a next part?" Innocence and ignorance, equally intriguing coming from him.

"You take it to a shrine so it can be purified." He tilted his head aside, hair flopping over his eyes. "It's very simple, Shuuichi-san."

Seiji saw him bite the inside of his lip to hold back something harsh, and it brought color to his cheeks. In an insult's stead, he huffed out his annoyance. "Okay, I'm going to a shrine next."

Huh. He'd really held back.

"The nearest shrine capable of purifying it," Seiji said, a bit of disappointment in his tone, "is an hour's train ride."

"You knew that off the top of your head?"

"Of course. My family works closely with Shinto and Buddhist priests. All good exorcists do," he added, to hopefully get a self-conscious pout from him – and there it was. Seiji grinned. "I'll take you to it; don't worry."

"I don't remember making you my partner!"

"And we aren't," he replied, too evenly. "Consider me a... guide, I suppose."

"I don't need _that_, either."

Seiji hummed, but Shuuichi had already learned that it meant he was indulging him, and so Shuuichi's mouth turned down further; his cheeks flushed warmer.

"Fine, let's go," Shuuichi said, walking ahead. And Seiji had learned of him: if he thought his pride wounded, he'd do what it took to hold together what was left of it. Like taking the lead in walking even when he was not the one who knew what train they needed.

Behind him, Seiji's lip quirked.

It was much past rush hour, and they were in the countryside, so the train was quite empty. Shuuichi chose a seat parallel to the window and Seiji plopped beside him before Shuuichi could put his bag there. As Shuuichi dumped his bag on his lap, he stifled a yawn.

"You can nap if you want," Seiji told him, stretching his legs, leaning forward as he peered sideways at Shuuichi. "I'll wake you when it's our stop."

He frowned. "Thanks, but I don't need to."

"It's fine if you do. Exorcisms are tiring, especially when you're just beginning."

"I'm not sleepy!"

Seiji sat up, leaning against the back of the seat. "You almost yawned."

"People can just yawn, you know!"

"You were hunting it since eight, you told me. We're an hour from home. What time did you get up?"

Shuuichi crossed his arms over the bag and turned his head to where Seiji could not see him. He didn't respond in words, but his silence was answer enough.

Seiji looked out the window across them. He kept his eyes to the top of the sky, the speed of the train smearing it the least – the stars slid leisurely by, as opposed to the nauseating distortion of night-darkened trees and fields spread below. It wasn't much to admire; the moon and starlight were not intense, and the most Seiji could discern were nature's shapes in subtly differing darknesses. Bored, he glanced aside, where Shuuichi was seated.

He was still stubbornly facing the opposite direction.

Exhaling a small laugh through his nose, Seiji faced back the night.

A few minutes short of an hour later, it was their stop, and Shuuichi, calmed, let Seiji lead the way. Though it was not difficult to do when paper lanterns' lights flanked the stone path winding up to the shrine, itself aglow.

"This is one of the bigger shrines in the area," Seiji explained. "For our purposes, these are better. Where more people go, more spiritual power resides, and the youkai are purified sooner."

Shuuichi was twisting his head every which way, mouth parted in awe. The paper lanterns on the walkway were steady, plump fireflies, and where lights were placed by the torii, its time-worn redness deepened and warmed, beautiful against the night. That light shone directly through his glasses, pure glass as they were, and reflected off his eyes in tiny pinpricks of brilliance.

Seiji smiled. Then, when Shuuichi bumped against a tree in his distraction, it folded to a snicker, to Shuuichi's blushing displeasure.

"We need to find a priest," Seiji said. "Tell me if you see anyone."

"Don't you have a contact here?"

"Maybe my family does, but I've never been up here myself, so I wouldn't know how they look like."

Shuuichi's eyebrows went up a little, and then he smirked in what he thought was to himself, apparently surprised Seiji didn't have all the answers to everything. Seiji let him have the satisfaction. It was the truth, anyway: he did not yet know everything about this world.

Not yet.

"Seiji," Shuuichi said, hand spirited to Seiji's shoulder. "There, by the bell."

He tore his eyes from Shuuichi's hand on him when he dropped it, then having no choice but to look to where Shuuichi was pointing. A bald man robed to match the gate's colors was sweeping bits of straw from the sacred bell's grounds. So careful were his movements the broom made but a whisper, a sound quiet enough to be blamed on the overactive mind seeking monsters in the wilderness of night.

Before Seiji walked to the priest, Shuuichi gripped him by the elbow, the thin cloth of his uniform held steadfast against his movement making him stagger.

"Wait," Shuuichi said, too late for his actions. "Is there anything we can do to– to make sure the youkai doesn't come back?"

Slowly Seiji faced him, surprise glinting to curiosity. "Why? Do you think your seal was improper?"

"No," Shuuichi pointedly said, but so too did his eye twitch. "I just want to be sure that it'll never bother anyone. Is there something to weaken it before the purification?"

Seiji eyed the speckle of stars above, thinking, lost in the patterns of constellations that had always domed over him and yet he could not name. That wasn't his duty. "Yes," he answered after a moment. "There's a spell. But," he said, Shuuichi's excitement tapering as swift as it had come, "it's very long. It requires you to say it in one breath, flawlessly."

Shuuichi's mouth did a funny little thing where it went from side to side, his thoughts being chewed. "Could you teach me?" he eventually got out.

Anyone with a weaker will would have sweetly, ever so politely beseeched Seiji to do the spell himself; as he already knew it, it was an effective use of time. Shuuichi would rather have that time wasted than allow Seiji's obvious greater skill its due.

Stubborn he was, yes. But what a will.

"Will you remember it?" Seiji asked, careful to carry himself with that nonchalance Shuuichi took him for.

His hands curled to fists; his eyes set like stone. "Yes."

Seiji smiled. "Then sure."

He found a stick and a well-lit area to etch the words upon the earth. Shuuichi seemed mildly affronted he'd have to read instead of remember a heard verse, but even Seiji had needed to study the words before he could pull them at will.

Writing took longer than speaking, and after a few minutes, with a cramp at the fleshy curve between his thumb and forefinger and rough lines from the wood redly imprinted on his hand, he finished. "Read it first," he said. "Be able to repeat it in your head with no mistakes. Then say it to me just as perfectly." He sat, the sealed youkai on his lap. "I'll wait."

That comment, benignly delivered, made Shuuichi stand straighter. The light in his eyes was not just an outer reflection. It was also his own pride flaring. Mutely, Shuuichi nodded, kneeling in front of the spell, head bowed as he read line by line. Again. Again, with his lips mouthing rapid silences. He closed his eyes now, but kept his mouth moving. Flinched. Opened his eyes, frowned at a character, repeated it to himself. Closed his eyes and started over. Like this, he made a mistake here and there three more times. On the fourth, when he opened his eyes, it was with an expression as sure as Seiji had ever seen it.

"I got it," Shuuichi said, and he did.

Seiji's eyebrows lifted, try as he did to have a neutral expression. His reply, however: "So you do."

"What now?"

Seiji held the pot up, eyeing it distastefully, as if the ceramic was not in the way of the youkai. "You have to put it before you," he said, doing so, "and with your hands, make this gesture." He demonstrated.

"No circle?"

"The one on the pot's sealing charm serves as the conduit."

Some of Shuuichi's confidence faltered at this oversight. Though he then nodded, determined, and moved the pot to him, standing as Seiji had. Another pause. "What happens if I mess up?"

"We'll find out firsthand."

"You didn't ask that from whoever taught you?"

"It never crossed my mind I would make a mistake."

Shuuichi scowled, and just as Seiji's smirk was about to widen, he said, "That's dangerous. And dumb. Even you aren't perfect."

It was the last thing Seiji was expecting to hear. He didn't have a reply.

Shuuichi continued talking, and fortunately Seiji didn't need to say something, certainly a veneered version of the truth. "Whatever. Here I go," he said, inhaling, beginning the spell with the first puff of his exhalation.

It was a typical spell, archaic words and purple prose, but it ended with a call to the gods to hear the invocation, nonsensical syllables that twisted the tongue. That was what Seiji had struggled to memorize. Shuuichi flowed through that effortlessly – as he had the whole thing, if Seiji was honest – but that he had tripped here where Shuuichi glided…

One of the things he'd keep to himself.

At the last syllable, the pot glowed from the center-out in a subdued white that tried to mimic the moonlight. It pulsed twice and then the glow receded in reverse, its own birth undone, before dying out. It hadn't been bright at all, but Seiji blinked, squinting his eyes to lessen the burn of the light still flitting like a spirit in his vision.

Shuuichi breathed in, raggedly. His throat worked as he swallowed to moisten his exerted throat. "Is that... all?" he asked, hope in his eyes, in the quirk of an incoming smile. "Did I do it?"

Blinking deeper – which only made the afterimages darker, more prominent – Seiji approached the pot on the ground, tentatively putting a finger to it. The ceramic was cold, colder than it should have been. He met Shuuichi's eyes with a smile.

Shuuichi returned it, unabashed in it for once.

They went to the priest, with Seiji briefly explaining who he was and what he'd brought. The mention of his name did not disturb a single wrinkle on the priest's face, who gratefully took the pot with a dip of his head and a solemn promise that he would see it purified. Seiji felt the incredulity in Shuuichi's eyes boring into him – that someone, a stranger, so easily accepted what Shuuichi couldn't get his own family to. He didn't say it outright, but Seiji sensed his ardor. Though he was glad Shuuichi had kept it mum. The assumption was wrong; this was no stranger, he who daily faced the divine and that in its opposite. That Seiji didn't need to make this explicit to Shuuichi was a… mercy, he thought, after tasting around for the word in their silent walk to the station. There was bittersweetness in his mouth, and it caused it to twist ever slightly.

The lights at the station were a harsh white, nothing like the gentle moon or stars at all. Shuuichi stood such that they didn't cut ugly shadows on him – he was leaning against the wall, choosing the shadows in the light's absence over what its presence would have carved where it pleased – but Seiji could feel the light cast its tricks on his own skin. He entertained himself by hopping around, spinning, twisting to get the shadows in all their different presentations. At times they clove his face in twain, at others just the sockets of his eyes. It depended on perspective.

"It'll also be an hour back," he said, settling by Shuuichi's side, entirely in the dark. "Are you tired?"

"No. Why?"

Briefly, he wasn't sure why he'd asked. It had seemed the thing to say, something to rile Shuuichi up, something to tell his own half-truths with. Eventually it came to him, and he spoke with such obvious insolence it was a wonder Shuuichi did not hear it. "You exorcised and performed an intensive spell successfully. My offer from before stands."

"So does my answer," Shuuichi said, the downturn of his mouth obscured by the dark, but never in his tone.

Seiji didn't reply, instead rolling back and forth on his feet, making himself think of nothing, especially not Shuuichi failing his promise by falling asleep on his shoulder, and soon the train was there.

They were the only ones aboard. Their feet were hollow in the empty space; it drank the sound of their very heartbeats – silence fell easier than the youkai had. Only the voice over the PA broke it in its tired monotone, but Seiji was too focused on watching Shuuichi to hear anything but the deepening of his breath, the slowing of his blinking. And always with his arms crossed, refusing to yield as his body betrayed him in everything else. Even his mouth was flattening, the muscles required to twist it relaxing.

Seiji himself didn't realize he'd pulled closer to Shuuichi with every passing minute. It was only when he silently mouthed his name and Shuuichi's wayward hair swept across his mouth that he noted, with detached fascination, how close he was.

Shuuichi's arms were slack, more of a self-embrace than self-restraint; his eyes were the thinnest slits, his lashes full and still. He was falling asleep, he was just barely allowing himself peace with Seiji around.

There was an odd tightness in Seiji's chest. Around where his heart was, it felt like. Choosing not to think anything else of it, he sat back, properly, facing forward.

And then he didn't have the luxury of ignoring it because Shuuichi's head was falling on his shoulder, a weight warm with the stuff of him, sharp in the angles and bones of his face, and yet how very comforting. His hair, growing a tad too long, feathered Seiji's neck. This was a boy on him, but he was as heavy as a book, and with the smell of one as well – his family's paper craft he learned in the dusty, library-like storage room clung to him.

Seiji had never sat stiller.

He had two options. He could let Shuuichi keep sleeping on him, and accept the certain fluster he'd stammer out whenever he woke. Or he could skip to that now, partly because it would be amusing for him to wake him and instigate that response; partly because if Shuuichi did not move, Seiji was not sure what softhearted mistake he'd commit.

So. Better to have it quelled now.

"Shuuichi-san," he said, pressing a fingertip to Shuuichi's cheek. His skin squished under it, and it was precisely when Seiji had his finger all the way down that Shuuichi blinked blearily at him. And, by the third blink, he startled, fully awake.

"Forget that happened!" he yelped, the blanching subway lights unkindly pointing out the red splotches on his face.

"Forget what happened?" Seiji said, mildly, and that seemed to do it in assuaging Shuuichi, who huffed quietly as he stared out the window glossy with night.

From the corner of his eye, Seiji looked at the back of his head.

As he looks at him now, immediately recognizable in this crowd, in any crowd – with that light hair of his tufting out of his unfashionable hat, the clothes tailored wrong to his slim figure. The very presence that Seiji can sense more acutely than a youkai. The very person who avoids him with more repulsion than the things he kills. With single-minded purpose Shuuichi walks, direction opposite Seiji's, to the train station. It's all it takes for Seiji to relive that summer's day blending to night from seasons and seasons ago worryingly crisp in his memory.

And he must have stopped too long, because he hears Nanase beside him say, "Something the matter?"

He turns to her, the smile preceding him. "It's nothing," he says, remembering.


	2. blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seiji looks down at the broken cup. "Oh my. I apologize," he says, just a tad too late for it to be believable to Shuuichi, but it only matters that others believe it – which remains to be seen. He lifts his gaze back to Shuuichi's, and that eye of his is flashing from too dark to too bright. "Let's find you a change of clothes, shall we?"
> 
> He'd _planned_ that.

Trouble always takes the black, swishing shape of Matoba Seiji, but today, when he's wearing that night-dark suit like he'd been crafted from it, it is he who binds trouble as its master.

Shuuichi swallows. Or he tries, but his mouth's gone a little dry. To alleviate it, he takes a hasty sip from the drink he'd thoughtlessly grabbed from the refreshments table. But Seiji, overpowering the room despite being one man, finds his eyes on his and smiles. Shuuichi flits his eyes elsewhere, the drink going down wrong, the cough he's stifling itching his throat, watering his eyes.

Neither luck nor good sense have ever been Shuuichi's allies. Seiji glides over, moving between the gathered exorcists with the deadly slowness of melted metal.

"Natori-san," he says, facile grace in his tone, in his smile, "I didn't think you'd make it today. How good of you to come."

Shuuichi has not moved the cup from his mouth. With Seiji here, he will keep it taut to him – it will save him from speaking. He takes another drink, small as to not waste his excuse for silence in one go, and raises a shoulder in a noncommittal shrug.

Instead of moving on, Seiji folds his hands behind his back and leans forward, too scandalously close for a room full of people ignorant of what the two of them confine to closed, dark rooms. What he says, voice rising and falling like the tides, and just as a threat to Shuuichi's drowning: "Are you thirsty, Natori-san?"

Shuuichi's fingers lose their hold on the cup, which splashes its contents on his shirt before breaking at his feet, in the tiny space between him and Seiji. One of the lanky Matoba shiki is already writhing over to clean it, and the sight of it, inhuman, between two people like them, must certainly be something. A few exorcists are already whispering behind their hands as they cast curious sideways glances their way.

Seiji looks down at the broken cup. "Oh my. I apologize," he says, just a tad too late for it to be believable to Shuuichi, but it only matters that others believe it – which remains to be seen. He lifts his gaze back to Shuuichi's, and that eye of his is flashing from too dark to too bright. "Let's find you a change of clothes, shall we?"

He'd _planned_ that.

Shuuichi has opened his mouth to make that same accusation dumbly in the presence of others, but Seiji thinks quicker – he'd instigated this; he must have this plotted to conclusion – and glides away as smoothly as he'd come. Closing his mouth, feeling uncomfortable warmth from embarrassment and something else entirely, Shuuichi follows.

They appear cordial enough to the stray shiki or exorcist they pass in the halls in their search for a storage closet, far away, that no one else may stumble upon. Upon them. No secret must be more choked to silence than what the Natori and Matoba sons have tangled themselves to.

When the hall is empty but the weight of themselves, Seiji slides open a disused room's door in a forgotten corner of this equally disused house, and he shoves a yelping Shuuichi in. The lights are off, but Shuuichi knows there is dust here; it's thick as mud in his nose, scratchy on his squinting eyes. The door rasps as Seiji closes it.

The first darkness that envelops them is the room's, this denial of light. That much is obvious.

It's the second that's more dangerous: Seiji's darkness, in his hair and clothes and probably his heart. Immediately after the door closes, Shuuichi feels Seiji wrap his hands around his neck, finding him despite his blindness, pulling him close but leaving the most infinitesimal gap between them. A gap that keeps Seiji's breathing light as ghosts on Shuuichi's skin, a gap that keeps Seiji's mouth from brushing his.

Until Shuuichi speaks, at least.

"Why the suit?" he asks, touching different slivers of Seiji's lip as his mouth changes shape with his words.

"Do you like it?" Seiji says, now Shuuichi's mouth the one a kiss is almost pulled from.

"That's not the point," he says, to avoid saying _Yes_, but it's in the absent gliding of his hands to Seiji's hips.

The only person better at detecting deflections than him is the man all but wrapped around him, and his reply had been futile the moment he'd said it. "So you do," Seiji says, voice the only bright thing here, incorporeal as it is.

He purses his mouth.

Seiji's sigh is cool. "I got back from a meeting with a political client before this. You can imagine how bored I am to follow that with another meeting, and with people less entertaining."

"Is that why we're here?"

"You can think that if you like," Seiji says, and the smile Shuuichi can't even see is ingratiating. He cannot stop Seiji from saying what he has already said, but he can stop him from saying anything else, certain to be as insolent, and with a rushed, close-eyed dip of his head he swallows Seiji's next words with his own mouth.

Seiji's hands on his neck tighten at the sudden contact, and Shuuichi has the brief satisfaction of being the one to surprise Seiji, but that is soon over, as Seiji allows himself to be deprived use of his tongue, fully submitting himself to Shuuichi. Which is not like him.

Shuuichi cuts himself off Seiji, opening his eyes. The dark is strong, but not as strong as it had been when he'd been pushed to it, and he can make out the vague outline of Seiji's face. He thinks the shadows are pulling themselves in a suggestion of a smirk. _That_ is like him.

"What?" Shuuichi says, more raggedly than he'd like.

And now Seiji really is wrapping himself around him, one leg twined around Shuuichi's, one arm slithering down to his waist. It speeds up Shuuichi's heartbeat now as it did the first time they'd succumbed to this. The hand still at Shuuichi's neck curls a lock of hair around a finger. Uncurls. Curls. To and fro with nothing said between them, nothing to abate Shuuichi's terrible need to kiss him sore but a repeated, lazy tug at his hair.

"Is this all we're doing today?" he asks.

"Why?" Seiji says, calm and quiet. "Did you want more?"

_Yes_. "Sometimes, I really don't like you."

"Ah, so sometimes you do?"

Shuuichi shuts him up with a kiss so rough their teeth click together. Their mouths aren't quite aligned, but it's somehow exactly what they needed, or at least what they wanted. It has Shuuichi digging his thumbs to Seiji's hip bones; it has one of Seiji's hands bunching on the back of Shuuichi's collar as the other, poised at Shuuichi's waist, has jerked to his belt buckle; and just as Shuuichi is thinking the suit might look best crumpled on the floor, Seiji bites him. On his bottom lip. A purposeful bite, teeth sinking down; it gets a sound out of Shuuichi, and it gets him pulling away from Seiji.

He reaches up to his lip, pulsing with a fainter version of his heartbeat, and though it stings he wipes his thumb across the cut. He stares at it. Sees nothing – it's too dark. The blood, too. But he feels it, little spots of something wet and warm, something his drawn out by Seiji so heartlessly. More blood wells up on his lip to replace what he's just smeared off.

"Was that too much?" Seiji asks, not a drop of concern in his voice. That, too, is like him: his words are never wholly presented or meant.

"You drew blood!"

Seiji hums. It sounds as if it's come from a smile.

So Shuuichi asks, pointed as the marks inflicted on him: "Are you _smiling_?"

The reason Seiji knows what a deflection is is because he too is well-versed in their art. "I think you should go rinse your mouth."

Shuuichi is thinking the same thing, and yet his tongue still darts out to clean the blood, metallic twang at the tip of it. "What did you do that for?"

Something whispers; something less dark than the room moves fluidly up-and-down: Seiji had shrugged. "But won't it be interesting to see what others make of it?"

Shuuichi hadn't thought that far ahead. With it said to him, a sharp panic strikes him. "That's the opposite of interesting! We're trying to _not_ be found out."

"And if we are, none will dare question its veracity. So I wonder, to even avoid such sacrilegious thinking, how people will explain the teeth marks on your mouth."

"I can't believe you!"

"That I can live with." A pressure, slight and blunted and separated, on Shuuichi's chest: Seiji's fingertips, splayed, accusatory as they press onto him, force reaching the mania of his heart. "But you can't tell me you completely disliked it."

Shuuichi had made a sound at the bite. Had it all been from pain?

If there is one thing to thank the dark for, it's that it conceals the color on his face. But not all of what Seiji's question does to him can be concealed. Shuuichi opens the door just enough to peek left and right for any stragglers; finding none, he slips out without a glance back.

Instead, he casts his eyes down to his thumb. The blood is drying dark.


	3. sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They pass the house with the loquat trees, and there he lingers just a step too late, and there too does Shuuichi's protesting falter. But he keeps walking. Shuuichi's protests dwindle, halfhearted.
> 
> The day is warm, but it is not yet summer. The loquats would not be sweet. It is best to leave them for now; another day they might return, as they have before, and finally taste them.

Seiji is rounding the street corner, someone's tall cement fence obscuring all but but lush treetops from his young height, when he bumps into Shuuichi. Quite literally. Perpendicular as their walking was, Shuuichi's bony shoulder digs onto Seiji's chest, and his feet stomp Shuuichi's. Limbs tangled, they stagger from the force of contact, though they remain on their feet.

He knows it is Shuuichi he bumped into for the musty scent of paper that hits him a fraction of a second before Shuuichi's body does. But Shuuichi does not recognize him the same.

"I'm so–" Shuuichi says, stepping back, mussed hair fluttering from the sudden movement, and then he sees who he's apologizing to. His tone rises. "Seiji?!"

"Yes. I don't get a 'sorry'?"

Shuuichi closes his mouth, embarrassed. "Yeah, sorry. I just–" He's rubbing his knuckles. "What are you doing here? You don't live nearby."

But Shuuichi does. "I was walking," Seiji says. It's not a lie. It is simply not the whole truth.

"Is there an exorcism job nearby?" He has not stopped rubbing his hand. He seems to not be aware he's doing it; the movements are so idle and small despite their incessantness, but it is so out of place it is what Seiji flits his eyes to. Shuuichi's hand hadn't hit him, so why would–

There is red crevassed in Shuuichi's knuckles. Blood recently shed from cuts freshly opened.

"You're hurt," Seiji says, sounding more accusatory than he'd meant, though the sharpness is not meant for Shuuichi.

Confusion, surprise, and finally guilt pass over Shuuichi's face, but the guilt twists itself to that stubbornness Seiji could cut himself with. "I'm fine," he says, drawing his hands behind his back.

Not quickly enough. Seiji's hand darts out and grabs Shuuichi by the wrist, pulling him as close as their unintended encounter had been, now with every purpose. Shuuichi protests, tugging back, but there is a strength in Seiji he does not normally possess. Shuuichi's hand remains firmly in his grasp as his gaze, careful and slow despite its incorporeality, examines the injury.

"What happened?" he asks, with the distant demand of thunderclouds approaching.

"Nothing."

"So you're telling me I am not staring at cuts deep across your knuckles?" He flits his eyes up, but Shuuichi is pointedly looking elsewhere. "Are you saying my eyes are wrong?"

Shuuichi glances at him, mouth sliding down. "Seiji–"

"Let's find you a water fountain so you can wash your hand, at least," he says, turning his grip to fingers loose between Shuuichi's as he walks them on. His hold is loose because this is not something he should be doing, and minimizing the contact is what is best for them both. But there is also something ambiguously-shaped roiling in him: what would happen if he dared to properly hold Shuuichi's hand?

While Shuuichi whines one meaningless protest after another, attempting to wiggle free, Seiji walks forth in sacred silence. It doesn't bother him, not much, to do this and be shunned for it. Because for all his loud blustering, Shuuichi doesn't leave.

Seiji has a vague idea of where there might be a public park with a water fountain, as he's not a stranger to this area, not anymore. Though if he gets lost, it would not be so bad. His fingers tighten, briefly, barely there, wrapped around Shuuichi.

He turns his head to the side. He's been walking with the cement fences to their right, tree tops glimpsed over them changing from artless nature to careful trims. The kinds of trees change as well: some leaves are squat and thick, some are wisps; some are lush with flowers, some are full of nothing but themselves. Some bear fruit.

They pass the house with the loquat trees, and there he lingers just a step too late, and there too does Shuuichi's protesting falter. But he keeps walking. Shuuichi's protests dwindle, halfhearted.

The day is warm, but it is not yet summer. The loquats would not be sweet. It is best to leave them for now; another day they might return, as they have before, and finally taste them.

"Do you even know where you're going?" Shuuichi asks.

"Are you going to tell me what happened?" he counters, going sharp around a corner, Shuuichi's feet quick and scratchy on the sidewalk, nearly stumbling.

The silence that wedges itself between them is dense with petulance. He does not feel Shuuichi's eyes on him. He's probably glaring at the floor in simmering contemplation.

"A tree," Shuuichi says a bit later, and it is so to Seiji's surprise he stops walking and looks back, hand shifting in Shuuichi's but not letting go. "I hit a tree," he continues, awkward.

"On purpose?" he asks.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Shuuichi's mouth clamps shut, tension tight in his pursed lips. "My dad said something and– I got angry. Went outside. Hit a tree. Decided to walk and cool off, then I ran into you."

Seiji's hand tightens around Shuuichi's again, but it is not from a softness he will not speak. "What did he say?" he asks, practiced calm from his life immersed at the top of a world accepting the supernatural. The opposite of Shuuichi, whose family's lifelong scorn spreads feverishly to his blood.

He grimaces. "It doesn't matter."

Seiji's reply is heavy on the tip of his tongue, pushing against the back of his teeth, where it dies upon his swallow. _But it does_, he would have said if he had ignored the dangerous beat of his heart, out of sync with the swirling pulses in his head.

Instead, he whirls around, and resumes their search for a water fountain. Perhaps spurred to action by the irritation tinging the edge of his vision, he is soon at the park he knew was around here, holding Shuuichi's hand over a cold stream of water. It is cold enough Shuuichi sets his jaw, and even Seiji, whose skin catches only the droplet remnants, shivers.

The drain runs with pinkish water, Shuuichi's blood dried already, the flow of it ceased. Soon there is no color in the water at all. Seiji steps off the pedal; metal squeaks, water gurgles down and away and is silent. Like the two of them, the only ones quiet on this spring day bright with life.

Shuuichi steals his hand back at the same time a plane whirs somewhere overhead.

"Would you like a handkerchief?" Seiji asks, watching laughing children chase each other or rise to the sky on a swing set.

He hears instead of sees Shuuichi shake his shaggy head.

The plane sounds louder, so Seiji looks up. Indeed, it is above them, its size throwing all below in shade. Odd that it is flying in this place, sleepy in its ordinariness. He waits for it to become a white dot before looking back down, then spotting a convenience store across the street.

"He said–" Shuuichi starts, sudden as a squall, and as suddenly stops. When Seiji is looking at him, there is no indication in the stiffness of his unchanging posture that he'd spoken at all. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe Seiji had imagined it.

"Let's get a snack," he says, to fill that uncertainty with something safe. He heads for the store without looking to see if Shuuichi follows.

A cloud that had been over the sun drifts away, the light shining through in segments until it is full and triumphant in its warmth and in its glinting on Shuuichi's hair, bobbing next to him.

Seiji muffles a smile.

The store's doors open with an air-conditioned drone. Seiji does not return the clerk's polite greeting; he speeds to the baked goods. Red bean, custard, strawberry fillings inside golden bread. So much sweetness. His teeth ache as if he's eaten them all.

"Take your pick," he tells Shuuichi, gesturing to the shelves.

Shuuichi glances at him sidelong. "Are you buying it for me?"

"Yes. Why so distrustful?"

"It wasn't clear," he mumbles, bending to eye the second row of breads: the salty fillings, the spices. He grabs a pork bun. "This one, please."

Seiji pauses. Though he isn't sure why. The smile comes of its own, as practiced as his calmness. "Alright," he says, grabbing without looking a bread of his own – and it's sweet, sweet as a fruit he wants to have. He takes Shuuichi's from him and goes to the counter with greater speed than he'd come in with.

The same drone sounds them out, returned to the weekend's lazy warmth, its comforting lull.

Immediately after this suburban mediocrity: "You're not going to make me tell you what he said?"

Seiji preoccupies himself with opening his bread perfectly along the bag's crinkles. "I want to know, but I won't force it from you." The bag opens. "I think I could safely guess what he said." He pushes the bread out to take a bite out of it. Sugary, obviously, but not horribly so. An artificiality he can abide, one he sometimes needs to taste. He offers Shuuichi a bite and he thinks he's smiling, but with the food in his mouth and the unnerving emptiness in his stomach, he isn't certain it's there, or if it is, if it is convincing. "Want some?"

Shuuichi looks at it and then meets Seiji's eyes. Confusion is on his brow, red is speckled on his cheeks. "Why are you being so–" He does not get further than that, cutting himself up abruptly. His eyes rush swiftly to the dusty pavement, layered pollen and petals and human debris marred by footsteps besides their own.

"So…?" Seiji prompts, keeping his eyes on Shuuichi even if he won't. He can also likely guess what Shuuichi did not say. It's a word like the bread filling up his mouth. A word like the loquats out of his reach. A word he would never use to describe himself, but a word that sometimes takes over him, seemingly artificial coming from him, when Shuuichi is near.

The sigh Shuuichi gives is so deep it droops his shoulders forward. "Never mind," he mumbles, with frustration cast more at himself than Seiji. "Thanks for the food." Head bent down, hair flopping to leave his eyes visible only through its choppy parts, he hastily eats his pork bun.

There is no reason to continue looking at him. Still Seiji considers Shuuichi for one, two, three more heartbeats, and then turns to the sun, hiding anew behind another passing cloud, its cotton borders muted with gold. The brightness in his vision is accompanied well by the crispness of the bread's packaging, plastic in his ears, plastic sweetness parted by his teeth, grimy in his mouth.


	4. gossip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What is it?"
> 
> Given permission to speak, he shuffles closer, though his hands keep wringing, and his eyes shift to the door and back to Nanase. "I've, um... I've noticed sometimes, Matoba-sama disappears?" His unsure tone, rising, phrases it like a question.

"Dismissed," Nanase says, the cut of her voice dutifully sending the Matoba clan members on their way. With Seiji's own voice hoarse by a cold, she has been speaking in his place. It's been going smoothly. She has the experience with the clan, of course, but it is her demeanor, blunt trauma to the clan head's meticulous cuts, that keeps their machine well-oiled. Perhaps scared into working, but what works works.

She watches them go, their people without their true leader here. Barely halfway through Seiji had left, that hair in its thin, lazy tail disappearing past the door frame with not even an excuse for his doing so. She gathers up papers and feels a smile. Some would call it a smirk, wry and high, and there is some amusement in it, but it does come out of a good place. He's grown, that boy. Just yesterday he reached her waist, commanding authority so easily despite his age. Even before his birth, the exorcists took to whispering of the might his father and mother's combined blood could make. Those whispers had proven right.

"Ah, Nanase-san?"

She slides her eyes up to a fidgeting young clan member, standing further from her than he should to properly converse. They are the last in the room. "What is it?"

Given permission to speak, he shuffles closer, though his hands keep wringing, and his eyes shift to the door and back to Nanase. "I've, um... I've noticed sometimes, Matoba-sama disappears?" His unsure tone, rising, phrases it like a question.

"Yes. He's a busy man."

"I mean, yes, of course, he is our esteemed leader, and I respect him, it's why I joined the Matoba clan, I know he has things to do, I do, but–"

She gives him a look for him to get on with it, and he squeaks out the rest of his blathering.

"But it's very early sometimes! He just leaves! And–" He snaps his mouth shut, coloring.

She'd be a fool not to know where this is going. But she'd be a bigger fool to goad him and prove his uncertainties true. "And what?" she asks, eyebrows purposefully furrowing to disinterest.

He looks to the floor, hands in fists, words strained out. "And it's almost always with or to that Natori…"

"Your point?"

He's floundering, unwilling to directly say what exorcists have now taken to muttering behind their hands when Seiji is elsewhere, in their ignorance forgetting Nanase remains. "Don't they hate each other? At least, we did historically. We're rival clans! But recently they've been…"

He really cannot spit it out. So be it; she will end this. "Are you accusing our clan head of something, boy?" There. Let her own vagueness and the insult of his namelessness so beneath her unnerve him.

_There_. He cannot possibly get any redder, and he's not even coherent, stammering apologies and excuses shoving each other in their rush to be said. Nothing gets said in its completion, though, and with one last squeaked _Sorry_, he scurries away.

Alone, Nanase allows herself a quiet laugh – at the boy's keenness and stupid bravery in asking; at the very person whose dignity she has preserved; at herself for doing any of this, and for being the first to realize years and years ago.

People think the Matoba heir and the Natori relict are romantically involved because they are.

She sweeps out of the room, papers in hand, retreating to her own study. These should go to Seiji, but he'd left the meeting for a reason. Let him have his vices; he may be the leader of a legion of people, but he's still a boy. Always will be, in her eyes. And the Natori boy softens him in a way familiar to her. Once she'd had her own comfort in another, and she'd been stolen from her so soon. So she will not rob Seiji – he with his mother's blood – of someone of his own. This is Nanase's conviction.

She opens the door to her study and shuts it with her elbow. She mindfully places the stack of papers on her desk before sitting in her chair, an office-type monster cushioning her as she reclines as far back as she can stand it, arms crossed jauntily, smile tossed to the ceiling. This was the very room she'd been in when she'd heard of the Natori family's revival in its singular son – and the person who'd told her, all but throwing her door open, had been Seiji.

Even his haughty poise, cloaked upon him at birth, could not obscure the glitter in his eye as he told her about the peculiar boy he'd met. Peculiar for having the sight, for being of an age with him, for being a Natori. Peculiar then. But now? It's fate, maybe.

She blows a laugh out of her nose, straightening up in her seat. As if she believes in such things. Neither does Seiji, raised as he was to know what power is in order to seize it, leaving nothing to the passivity of so-called fate. And yet. And yet there is an underlying romanticism to the things he says to that boy. And yet she can see he wants to believe something beautiful, not the ugly capriciousness of chance, had brought Natori Shuuichi to him again and again until they'd decided what they were being pushed to was worthwhile. Who wouldn't want to believe in something like that? He's still young. Naive to time's cruelty. He has not yet forsaken his more sentimental dreams.

Not that she'd ever say anything of this to Seiji. Neither of them has acknowledged this weakness of his; their mutual understanding of it is implicit, as are the benefits and necessity of being silent about it. It's not in them to voice such vulnerabilities. Though cognizant of them, they pretend they don't exist.

Until the gossip arises. She is not a Matoba by blood but she is in tooth and nail and so shall she fight with them. Nervous doubts cast over Seiji's capacity to lead because of what looks like love tender in his eye she tears apart like they are prey. In a way they are. In her renown, it is easy to frighten the other exorcists to behaving and keeping slanderous – if completely accurate – conjectures to themselves. There's something morbidly amusing about it, too. Still, she has her worries. If others think something is amiss, Seiji is not being careful about it. And care, and silence, are the only things that will save him.

She glances at her clock, analog thank you very much, and snorts at having spent fifteen minutes in this. Seiji should be free by now, so she sets off to hand him the papers. Maybe she'll catch a glimpse of Natori. Get him jumpy, spooked by her very presence, only his acting skills keeping him from nervous stammering. She doesn't do that out of dislike of him, much as he believes. It's just funny.

She's not close to the manor's wing housing Seiji's study – in the opposite place, in fact – but precisely because Matoba Seiji wandering a hall as inconsequential as this is where no one would think to find him in, it's where he is. He's escorting Natori out of a long-forgotten door that she knows will take him into the garden, and where it blends into the surrounding forest he can surreptitiously return to his own sphere of influence.

Ah, but before that: a quick, last kiss, with Seiji being the one tugging the boy to him with a thicker and yet somehow kinder version of the smile he wields elsewhere. It's got Natori pink and grinning in a way no agency-managed idol should. Then he slips out.

Seiji is absentmindedly fixing his hair and eyepatch as Nanase chooses to approach.

"There you are," she says, also choosing to continue their little unspoken scheme. "Read over these by our next assignment. This client's uptight and if you don't know the case like the back of your hand, they'll refuse to pay us full price." She hands the papers over, which Seiji takes with not an eyelash confusedly batted.

"Thank you," he says, cool regalness unmistakable even when sick, as they pretend there's not a ring of bites below his collarbone. But here he quirks his lip in a self-aware way. "Whatever would I be without your consideration, Nanase."

So she replies in the same. "You'd find someone else."

His smile drops little by little. It settles to pensiveness, a distance in his eyes despite his physical proximity to her. He looks toward the door Natori had left from. "Would I?"

She turns back, lest she be seen with a smile that would earn Seiji's childish mockery. "Sure."

She walks away, feet silent on the wizened wood floor, cloth whispering as it conceals well-loved skin behind her.


	5. doubt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There's no message there," Shuuichi says. "Life isn't so simple it can be predicted by what's left after a drink, of all things."
> 
> Hiiragi turns the cup slowly between her hands. "Not predictions. Suggestions. Observations."

"Master," Hiiragi says, somewhere in the kitchen behind Shuuichi, "did you drink tea from this cup?"

He glances up from his script, rubbing dryness from his eyes. "Yeah." The script flops carelessly on the coffee table where he throws it before stretching the tension from his arms. "Who else would it have been, one of you?"

Then he winces a little. That had been a bit rude, even if he had spoken to a supernatural servant.

"Sorry," he amends, seeing Hiiragi, impassive as ever, by the kitchen sink, the cup in her hand. "I'm tired. Even the tea didn't help."

He's been going over the script since the afternoon, after a morning exorcism with… an unexpected encounter, with nothing to power his system except caffeine and sheer will. The latter he never lacks in, but the former wanes its effects on him the more he consumes – so he only drinks more to make up for it. That cup Hiiragi is holding was his seventh tea for the day.

She tips her head slightly forward, evidenced only by a flutter in her bangs. "The leaves have a message for you."

He blinks, unsure if his mind had warped what she said to something unintelligible, or if he'd really heard right.

She says, "There is a message in these leaves."

He'd heard right.

"There's no truth to tea leaf reading," he says, frowning.

"Many people think youkai don't exist, either." _Yet here we are_, is her implication.

His mouth turns down, but he won't concede her point.

"Would you like to know what the leaves say?" she asks. He's certain she'd picked up on his petulance – here as in other occasions – and she moves on anyway. Very like something non-human to have no consideration of societal etiquette.

What he should say is _No_. He's never looked at the wet clumps of leaves at the bottom of his mugs and contemplated meaning in them; he's never based a decision on a pattern of leaves ringing a mug. They're what's left over of something better than themselves. Just leaves.

And still a part of him is curious. Perhaps a youkai, mystic as they are, could divine something in this equally mystic art. Perhaps he has been missing something by ignoring what the leaves have been saying all along.

She adds, "The message isn't negative."

Which isn't what he'd been thinking about. Now he is. Could his previous mistakes have been prevented by something as simple, as incredulous as reading tea leaves?

No. Youkai may exist, impossible as they are, but it does not mean everything in the fringes of belief does. These things are _leaves_.

"There's no message there," Shuuichi says. "Life isn't so simple it can be predicted by what's left after a drink, of all things."

Hiiragi turns the cup slowly between her hands. "Not predictions. Suggestions. Observations." She tilts her head up, and though her mask obscures her face, and though she is not close by, her painted eye is the skin-burning tip of a matchstick's flame. "The leaves arrange themselves in the words of your soul that you ignore."

Is she speaking of a general 'you,' or accusing him directly?

It doesn't matter, because he immediately takes it for the latter, standing quickly, dizzyingly. "What do _leaves_ think I'm not doing?" he says, bitter as tea brewed too long, forgotten in its steeping.

"I see indecision," she says.

His brows come together. Fine, maybe he's not as steady in his chosen path as he should be, but that is a general observation, something anyone could feel.

"I see regret–"

That, too.

"–over the wrong words said. You spoke of things you didn't mean and did not speak of what you did. The regret is mingled with doubt that your choice to do that was the right thing to do."

Oh.

_No_. No, no, no. This is all vague. And anyway, she's seen what he's like around– around–

"Him," she says, voice flattening with dislike in her realization. "This is about him, is it not? We saw him this morning–"

"Yes, I was there!" he says, fear and annoyance and something else he does not want to acknowledge rising in his throat, making him snap like this.

"I did not think running into him would upset you so, Master."

Neither had he. Has he not changed himself for the better these last few years? Has he not learned; has he not moved on? He glares at the floor and in so doing sees the black blur of his lizard traveling down his limp hand.

"That isn't all," Hiiragi says. "There is something I am having difficulty reading."

"There's nothing there!" he says, stomping down to the kitchen in a few large strides, swiping the cup from her hand.

He is clumsy in it and it falls, shattering with a sound sharp as an insult based on truth.

They both stare at the ceramic pieces, large and small alike, no discernible pattern in their breakage. They both stare at the tea leaves, meaningless to him in its wet spreading, and whatever Hiiragi claimed to see in it now lost.

"I apologize," she says. Shuuichi notes she is careful not to say what for.

Whatever. He runs a hand through his hair, in need of another wash. "Yeah. I'll clean it up."

He goes to his storage closet, a broom and dustpan stuffed there jarringly with exorcism scrolls and papers and inks.

And now, in this closed-off dusty darkness, he doubts his doubt.

Of course he's regretful. It's something he's lived with after compressing it to a nothingness incomplete, because he has never fully believed his regret had gone away.

Of course he's made choices he was never confident about. Some of them he is reminded of, in their causes and consequences, every day.

Biting the inside of his lip, indentations likely to persist for hours, he heads back, but his mind remains preoccupied. If something inanimate – perhaps given power by whatever forces keep youkai tethered to the mundane world – could divine the turmoil in him, what did it say about him? What if all these years, to be confident on his chosen path, all he'd had to do was glance down at the bottom of a cup?

"Ah," Hiiragi says, and Shuuichi's thoughts are broken by her interruption. "I know what it was I could not read." She turns to him, her voice muffled behind the wood of her mask, and yet with a hint of confusion: "The symbols for love and hate had swirled to one."


	6. contract

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Contracts with things unloved meant nothing; they were words on paper, power manifested in ink. A deed holding the other as theirs, though: the power came from their individual belief in it. The mutuality. The ink was but a physicality of the matters of the heart.

With one last tiny, horizontal slash of the paper, black ink seeping into every last of the paper's pore, Shuuichi's name is written and his heart has leaped thickly to his mouth.

"Now," comes the low voice beside him, "your life is bound to mine."

He looks up. "Did you have to word it like that, Seiji?"

"But it's the truth," Seiji replies, putting an affronted hand to his perfectly starched collar, like he had not completely intended the nuances in what he'd said.

Once, Seiji's purposeful nonchalance would have irked Shuuichi. He would have flustered and blustered, himself aware this is how Matoba Seiji was taught to be, yet being unable to accept it – and the other things the illustrious, insolent, inescapable Matoba Seiji brought forth in Shuuichi.

Once, that would have been.

Now he does nothing of the sort. Calmly setting the pen down, he reaches for Seiji's hand, the archery-made roughness in his fingers scratchy between his own, soft and faintly scented. "You're as bound to me as I am to you," he says, with a smile he never thought he could give him.

And Seiji returns it with a smile no one but Shuuichi has had the privilege to receive.

They let each other go to slide their papers over to the notary, her bored expression unchanging since her arrival, but not before her lines, rehearsed and repeated to monotony, of how long it will take for their papers to be approved and their partnership certificate granted. But better that demeanor than judgment. They've had enough of it, and because of who they are, it will not ever cease.

Ah, but their bones have had years to be strengthened, burdened by the weight of their names. Any failed expectations now mean nothing, especially when they face them together.

Their hands brush, but do not refind one another's, as they exit the building, austere government-typical steps a good height from the ground. Shuuichi goes down them quickly, more used to moving in pants than Seiji. At the bottom, he looks back. And up.

The afternoon November sun is an almost gentle thing. It shines, yes; even in the cusp of autumn it has not forgotten its fire, but it does not blind. It glows: a dim halo around itself, an enveloping softness to the earth beneath it. Seiji's hair and clothes, impossibly black, catch that sunlight in silken threads. And as Seiji descends to meet him, holding out a hand for support that Shuuichi immediately offers, he thinks, with another leap of his heart, _We're married_.

Well. Not yet. They still need the certificate. But it's the date that they've come to sign such papers to receive the coveted one that ultimately counts. The date they've chosen to make what they are a tangibility in ink, a record in an office, a proof they have been and they are and they will be together. They do not need a law to proclaim what they both think of this union.

Because the paper is not legally binding. Shuuichi had told Seiji this when they had first discussed marriage – or the closest to it they could have.

"Symbols have power, too," Seiji had replied, quite smoothly, and a breeze as tame as that had teased the eyepatch over his eye. "We both know this very well."

There were real benefits to be gained from getting a certificate, Shuuichi had acknowledged, but to proceed to this last step in their relationship would make enemies of the disquieted few who had expected else of the Matoba heir.

"Since when have I cared what others think of me?" Seiji had said, and briefly Shuuichi had felt foolish, like a younger version of himself, for doubting the tenacity of a Matoba. And not just _a _Matoba, but the youngest head in their history.

"Shuuichi?" Seiji says – in the present, with his fingers fitting between Shuuichi's like they were made for this and only this.

Just _Shuuichi_. No honorifics, no coolly muttered last names. They are Shuuichi and Seiji and they're-

"Married," he says aloud, so in disbelief he cannot keep the word to himself.

"Yes," Seiji replies, lip quirked up, "that's what we came here to do."

Shuuichi blinks. "Sorry, I was just… thinking."

Seiji does not let go of his hand, though he does drop their arms by their sides as he draws close to Shuuichi. "My, what a miracle that is."

"Hey," Shuuichi says, but there is no longer any true annoyance in it; it's said with a smile conceding his poor word choice's comeuppance. He starts walking, the streets a little busy with people out for lunch, and most of them are too absorbed in the details of their own lives to bother glancing at him: a man glittered by fame, deliberately posed across screens flickering and still, certainly never lacking for feminine attention, but with another man at his side.

_Most_ people ignore them. There are a few bewildered looks thrown their way, the same silent question in them all: _Was that Natori Shuuichi with a man clinging to him? _In Shuuichi and Seiji's careful attention to keeping the two of them private, they'd thus far avoided appearances in gossip magazines. There's no avoiding them now.

But. It won't be so terrible, will it? It is no longer gossip, unconfirmed by their mutual silence. It's real. Let everyone see.

"Do you want to do anything once we get the paper?" Shuuichi asks.

"Oh, absolutely. The number of people upset or disappointed by this does wonders for my mood," Seiji says, that once-familiar insult of a smile returned to his face. "Imagine them forced to make niceties to us in our own house."

"I meant more the two of us," he says, but it's through a grin.

Seiji's hand runs down Shuuichi's arm, slow as honey, less sweet than that. "There can still be plenty of that once we grow tired of their insipid obeisances. Today, even." He stretches that tiny height that separates them, lips to his ear. "_Especially_ today."

The sensation Seiji's hand on his had brought spreads through the whole of him. "Where do you think we're walking to?" he says, voice low, almost lost in Seiji's hair.

Seiji stands a little straighter, just realizing. "The apartment."

_The_ apartment. For years it had just been Shuuichi's. And though Seiji had never co-signed the lease, the apartment had found itself an occasional home to another person. Seiji's core of a house is, and will always be, the sprawling Matoba forest manor, just as it will never be Shuuichi's. At the apartment, if for a little while, they can prioritize the softer side of themselves.

Prior to their appointment, Shuuichi had hidden an expensive bottle of sake for celebration. It's still quite early in the day for inebriation, but those empty hours afterward could be filled with an abundance of the senses. He'd been hoping as much – and from Seiji's earlier comment, it was not as insubstantial as hope anymore.

Natori Shuuichi and Matoba Seiji. They of once-rival clans, they once lost in the swirling ambiguity of devotion and detestation, now bound in ink and paper, promised in blood and soul.

"Shuuichi, your eyes are wet," Seiji says, his mocking tone so subdued it's instead horribly fond. "Don't cry on me. This suit was expensive."

"I'm not crying!" he insists, because there are some things Seiji still affects him with.

"You're about to."

He is. After all this time, with such a conclusion neatly wrapping them up, how can he not? Each had dedicated their life to chasing ghosts when what they'd needed, at their simplest truths, was the warmth of the breathing other.

Contracts with things unloved meant nothing; they were words on paper, power manifested in ink. A deed holding the other as theirs, though: the power came from their individual belief in it. The mutuality. The ink was but a physicality of the matters of the heart. As tears are.

Though he won't let himself cry. There are too many other emotions in him now, and he would rather be swept in their elation, in laughter and touches, than even well-meaning tears.

So it's what he does: he stops and spins fast enough the world blurs, but never Seiji, and he tugs him by the lapels of that expensive suit, kissing him with the overwhelming fervor of a circuitous story completed to perfect resolution. Immediately Seiji kisses back, hands poised even then with grace over Shuuichi's shoulder blades, pulling him close as much as they hold Seiji up.

Some of his tears do drip from his lashes, ticklish down his cheeks, and are drunk in, sightless, by Seiji's suit.

It's Shuuichi who ends their kiss just as he'd started it. "Let's pick that up at home," he says, brushing his lips to Seiji's pout as he speaks, thumbing Seiji's cheek as if the tears had come from him.

The pout melts to that other smile of Seiji's, the one up to no good in a knee-trembling way.

To home it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't ask me what kind of downright revolution would need to happen for them to get married. i just wanted to finish w/ the big gay
> 
> i wrote all of these on my lunch breaks at work lol when there's a will there's a way


End file.
